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USA 2015 Day 5 – Kansas

After a tiring weekend it was time to work again – for today’s meeting I’d be meeting up with a colleague visiting Butler Community College. I was feeling far more refreshed than I had – after a slightly interrupted 4 hours of sleep. The breakfast at the Holiday Inn was actually the best one on the trip to date as there was a good choice available.

I was picked up from the hotel at 10:00 which gave us plenty of time before our meeting. It wasn’t far away either which meant we had time to prepare in the car park before turning up early. It was a good meeting and we found plenty to talk about, even after a break where a number of us went over to eat at a sports bar called Willies. I went for a chicken burger with fries which was about on par with many of the other meals I’d had the past few days in the US. In the afternoon the meeting then continued on and eventually, even though it could have lasted longer we had to say goodbye as we had a long drive ahead of us.

Due to the recent increase in highway speed limits it meant we actually arrived in Kansas City at around 18:50, after only 150 minutes. Along the drive I was expecting to see masses of corn fields, and barns – the sort of thing that TV shows and movies led me to believe Kansas was like. I did see some scenery that reminded me of this misconception, but on the other hand there were areas that could easily have been England.

Once I’d had chance to change we then drove into the city and was driven passed a number of the buildings on the outskirts of downtown, and was told how the city is actually half in Kansas and half in Missouri – something I hadn’t realised previously. As we crossed this border it meant that I’d actually already been into 3 US states on this trip, and with the drive through Iowa to Wayne in Nebraska it would be a total of five states in total.

Usually I only count a place as having been visited if I step outside of an airport there and take a photograph. In the case of Missouri, I did actually take a photograph from a place we stopped at called the Liberty Memorial. This is a large monument that towers over the city and is a memorial to those that died during the First World War. Underneath this memorial there is also a museum – the first museum in all of the United States to be dedicated to this war.

From here we drove downtown and parked near an area with a lot of restaurants. I was told that Kansas is famous for it’s barbecues so I was taken to a place called Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue. The dish I went with was a combo one that had Crown Prime beef ribs (which had amazing thick meat on), chicken, burnt ends, Hickory pit beans, and cheesy corn bake. It tasted amazing, but there was also an incredible amount of it – despite this I tried my best to finish it all and then had a chocolate dessert. If it hadn’t have been for the knowledge I’d be running the next morning I would probably have finished it.

I was then back at the hotel not long after 22:00 meaning I would hopefully have a decent night’s sleep at last.